Liberty, Equality & Law: Selected Tanner Lectures on Moral Philosophy

by John Rawls, Charles Fried

The major moral issues of our time have been made vital and immediate by the convergence of numerous factors. Among these are a technology that has produced the threat of nuclear holocaust, that can maintain life beyond the death of the brain, that can destroy the natural world, and that produces deadly, indestructible waste. There is a new sensitivity to the injustices suffered by minorities. Impoverishment and starvation are now the fate of millions. Political tyranny is a continuing threat. Finally, the rise of a new religiousness has had an impact on morals and public affairs. In these provocative essays chosen from The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, four internationally distinguished scholars explore the moral implications of these issues in today's world.

205 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 1987

About the author

John Bordley Rawls was an American philosopher and a leading figure in moral and political philosophy. He held the James Bryant Conant University Professorship at Harvard. His magnum opus A Theory of Justice (1971) is now regarded as "one of the primary texts in political philosophy." His work in political philosophy, dubbed Rawlsianism, takes as its starting point the argument that "most reasonable principles of justice are those everyone would accept and agree to from a fair position." Rawls employs a number of thought experiments—including the famous veil of ignorance—to determine what constitutes a fair agreement in which "everyone is impartially situated as equals," in order to determine principles of social justice.

Rawls received both the Schock Prize for Logic and Philosophy and the National Humanities Medal in 1999, the latter presented by President Bill Clinton, in recognition of how Rawls's thought "helped a whole generation of learned Americans revive their faith in democracy itself."

Reviews

[Jay · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book consists of four articles by prominent philosophical thinkers: John Rawls, Charles Fried, Amartya Sen, and Thomas Schelling. By far my favorite is Schelling’s piece. It’s a very original question, and I found it to be accessibly written (as compared to Rawls’, which was almost half the book, assumed the reader had prior knowledge of his work, and was the very epitome of unnecessarily complicated academic language). Beyond that, I don’t think there’s much to say. For someone like me who’s a philosophy nerd this is an interesting series of articles, but none of the authors are bringing anything terribly original to the table – even in Schelling’s case, where he discusses our fluid sense of self when it comes to controlling our own behavior, the article is deeply entrenched in Western assumptions and philosophy, and there’s little in the way of moving beyond that.